A mesmerizing Fred Eversley sculpture has come to Central Park

New York City has been awash in Barbie pink the entire summer and a new outdoor art piece is keeping the rosy makeover going through fall and beyond.

From Thursday, September 7, 2023 through Sunday, August 25, 2024, Central Park goers can get an eyeful of ”Parabolic Light,” a 12-foot tall, magenta-tinted sculpture from Brooklyn-born artist Fred Eversley, set at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue. Cast in polyurethane and shaped like a tapered cylinder, the luminescent piece “serves as a focal point of serenity, transcendence, and exploration of new dimensions and perspectives,” reads a press release.

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The free outdoor exhibition, which is presented by Public Art Fund, is not only the artist’s first public sculpture in his hometown of New York but also the first outdoor placement of any of Eversley’s large-scale polyurethane resin works. “Parabolic Light” marks a continuation of the sculptor’s “Cylindrical Lens” series, a collection of free-standing, floor-based sculptures that debuted at David Kordansky Gallery this past May and harken back to the pieces Eversley first presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art all the way back in 1970. It’s also the largest addition to the series. 

“My parabolic forms are all about energy. They are made to reflect all the infinite combinations of internal reflections, refractions, color changes, and other optical phenomena that one can experience within a single sculpture,” said Eversley. “Parabolic Light and its display in Doris C. Freedman Plaza resonates with my vision of an energetic outdoor focal point to attract public audiences to spontaneously pause, slow down, and engage in numerous ways with a cosmic, mystifying object.”

Added Nicholas Baume, the Artistic & Executive Director of Public Art Fund: “Fred Eversley’s art immerses us in perceptual experiences that bring us outside of ourselves. He explores how an artwork may inhabit the world around it while simultaneously inviting us into the realms of imagination and mystery. Parabolic Light, Eversley’s first public work in his home city, takes his series of pristine cylindrical sculptures to a new scale and context, engaging with the ever-changing outdoor environment, the effects of natural light, and the countless visitors whose attention it captures.”